Artem Golubev’s Post

7 Core Lessons for Aspiring Tech Leaders 1. Develop T-shaped expertise T-shaped means deep expertise in one area with broad knowledge across several domains. Leaders need a multifaceted knowledge base to lead a diverse team of individuals. Understand the organization outside your expertise, and the human elements that are the backbone of your team. 2. Don’t get too attached to tools and approaches It’s a common pitfall to be too loyal to dev tools or programming languages. But you need to be objective to select what’s best for your organization, even if that means a shift from your comfort zone. Embrace adaptability: innovation is needed for businesses to thrive. 3. Understand what changes and what stays the same The tech landscape is changing constantly and relentlessly. But many foundational principles remain, and universal skills will always be important: problem-solving, critical thinking, and creativity. 4. You are responsible for your people The individuals who make up your team are indispensable. Always consider if they’re feeling valued and appreciated, if your team members trust each other, and if they’re being fulfilled under your company’s vision. These don’t directly measure your success, but their impact is undeniable. 5. Make your imposter syndrome work for you It’s normal to have doubts in leadership or when navigating new experiences. But when you do worry about your capability, use it as motivation for growth. Learn as much as you can to grow into a better leader; only then can you cast off your doubts. 6. It’s not about the tech, it’s about the product When you’re choosing options for your workflow or product, ask questions: what’s the user base, what is the scope for innovation, should you try open-source or proprietary? Your products should solve problems and add value for your users, and your tech is just a tool to create them. 7. Remind yourself of the spotlight effect This psychological term means we feel we’re constantly being scrutinized, and everyone will judge if we succeed or fail. But most people don’t care, they’re preoccupied with their own problems. And this also means your accomplishments won’t always get the spotlight they deserve. But your journey as a leader, improving your skills and progress is for your own growth as a person. So focus on what really matters: your development, your people, and your shared goals. Let us know your thoughts on these lessons. 👇 testRigor, the #1 Generative AI-based Test Automation Tool that uses Generative AI to execute manual test cases. #techleadership #cio #cto #leadershiptips

Why did 51% of tech executives see no profit or performance boost from digital transformation? The biggest pitfall is a gap in change management. For proper change management in digital transformation, you need to: ➡ Engage your stakeholders in your plans ➡ Ease adoption for your employees ➡ Improve the experience for all your customers Pushing changes to end users causes a productivity dip and delay in value. So how can we ease end-user adoption to reduce this dip? Make change management a part of your process throughout. ✅ Start with the why: show customers how this change will benefit them. This is important for employees too, so let them see why the initiative is important. ➡ Crafting a vision statement will help communicate your transformation’s value. Next, ✅ Integrate change management in your sprints. One valuable option is to interview end-users or review performance metrics in each sprint. This keeps your team tuned into how their work can match users’ needs. Lastly,  ✅ Don’t let devops undermine change management. Frequent deployments are efficient for devops but can add to end-users’ burden. But there are ways to minimize your deployments’ negative impact: ➡ Have automated deployment only for small fixes and minor changes. ➡ Roll out releases to smaller user segments at first, for certain features or canary releases. ➡ When deployments change workflows or user interfaces, manage the release with change management oversight. How do you ease the process of change for your users? 👇 testRigor, the #1 Generative AI-based Test Automation Tool that uses Generative AI to execute manual test cases. #digitaltransformation #changemanagement #cto #cio

✨ How to Transform Your Business for the Long Haul ✨ Only 1 in 5 businesses survive past the 20-year mark. Time brings new competitors, so surviving requires reasons to stick with you. The key to thriving is finding ways to evolve. Digital transformation can be a huge help there, to integrate new technology and provide new ways to run your business. Some of the biggest names out there have done this to great effect. 📺 Netflix's adaptation of online streaming was itself a digital transformation. > They transformed again with a content-driven strategy, producing and investing in their own original shows. 🔺 LEGO was saved by digital transformation, after nearing bankruptcy in 2003. > They restructured with a bigger online presence, apps to accompany physical LEGO sets, and LEGO video games and movies. From these, we can identify some points that make digital transformation especially valuable. 👉 A large, engaged customer base: Engagement gives you more data about their perspectives. > Collect user feedback on digital ways to meet their needs. 👉 Integrating the right technology: identifying your needs and what tools to adopt. > AWS is one many can adopt, already providing countless companies storage and infrastructure. 👉 Building competitive advantage: find your business's unique strength and build it up with technology. And keep in mind, small businesses can benefit as much or more. One survey showed 8x the growth from small businesses in digital transformation! You can start with online assessment tools to measure your business's digitalization, and pinpoint areas where you can improve. Analyze the data you have, or can start to collect easily. If you know how your users find you and how they behave, you can develop new strategies to engage them. 💡 So know your options and gear up for a digital transformation: Through transformation, you can revitalize your business and not just survive, but thrive. What are your ideas for how to digitalize a business? 💬 testRigor, the #1 Generative AI-based Test Automation Tool that uses Generative AI to execute manual test cases. #digitaltransformation #digitalization #restructuring #businessstrategy

Protecting Your Company From Cyberattacks in 2024 2023 was an all-time high in data breaches, a 72% increase since the previous record in 2021. ➡ Post-breaches, publicly traded companies had an average decline of 7.5% in stock value: Beyond direct financial cost, reputational damage is a major risk to founders. So I wanted to share advice sourced from many cyber leaders. To start: ✅ Prioritize security at all levels in an organization. Generative AI has made cyberattacks much more accessible to low-skill hackers. ➡ So to compensate, train all your employees in cybersecurity awareness. All it takes is one employee to slip up. But we can build in protections against that: ✅ Use a zero-trust security strategy. Zero-trust strictly requires user verification for any resource access, even on a private network.   Traditionally, the “castle-and-moat” security model protected access to a network but trusted everyone inside it. Distributed cloud data means we can’t hold all data on one protected network, but we can check anyone trying to access it. ➡ Two-factor authentication will add protection here even if a password is stolen. ✅ Invest in skilled cybersecurity talent. Not everyone has up-to-date awareness of cyber threats. Hiring your own in-house professionals can be invaluable for security incidents: ➡ But also consider external talent specializing in cyber advisory. Companies with proven reputations can be worth the cost. ✅ Consider AI and automation to boost cyber defenses. I mentioned how AI has made hackers more dangerous, but it can be used for good, too. ➡ AI and automation can flag false positives or handle tedious but critical security processes. So look into valuable tools that can help your security team and organization. How have you and your company prepared for cybersecurity defense? 👇 testRigor, the #1 Generative AI-based Test Automation Tool that uses Generative AI to execute manual test cases. #cybersecurity #cyberattacks #techleadership #leadershiptips

How Can We Forge Effective Partnerships for Strategic Skills? When partnering for expertise and strategic insight, you need a different approach than conventional outsourcing. If hiring partners to lead strategic initiatives, we need to allow more partner governance while still rigorously assessing their effectiveness. ➡ But often we’ll also seek partners offering skills core to our own strategy. And in fields like AI, with a high demand and talent shortage, changing approaches is still important. For instance, screening potential partners in new technologies without proven experience. ✅ When partnering for emerging skills, budget more time for finding the right partner and stay close to their progress. Of course leaders first need a clear picture of our internal capabilities to know external needs. ✅ Investing in workforce planning can reveal key insights before outsourcing begins. When planning a partnership, it’s also important to know what model you want. Ask your team whether they’d work well with staff augmentation, for instance. A deeply embedded partner will have different effects than an external one. And on the note of compatibility: ✅ Choose a partner aligned with your culture and ethics. In a field like AI, ethical concerns are constantly in the spotlight. ➡ You want a partner you can trust to have compatible values with yours. This is essential, both for maintaining a satisfied customer base and internal workforce. Especially since for internal concerns: ✅ You’ll want to encourage knowledge transfer between your organizations. If you’re asking a partner to help you transform or build new teams, they’ll be learning more about you and vice versa. ➡ Overall, when depending on a partner for your business outcomes, setting up a strategic partnership will situate you better: In doing so, capitalize on your partner’s skills to foster your own innovation and growth. What do you look for in a business partner? 👇 testRigor, the #1 Generative AI-based Test Automation Tool that uses Generative AI to execute manual test cases. #cio #cto #techleadership #leadershiptips #partnership #strategicpartnerships

How CTOs Can Drive Essential Innovation Innovation is a necessity to survive in today’s market: And CTOs, as strategic leaders, are the ones who must foster it. ➡ A CTO’s vision should encourage creative thinking and calculated risks. You need to assess emerging technologies, either yourself or as a team, to choose the ones that will best benefit your organization. ➡ Act cooperatively with other stakeholders. Know other departments’ needs and collaborate with them, and communicate your vision to gain support for new changes. ➡ Find the right balance between legacy and innovation. Innovation is important, but you need the benefits to be worth any disruption and cost. ❗You must assess your current infrastructure to see how best to integrate new technologies, to maintain organizational agility and keep critical operations ongoing. Here’s some strategic goals you can set to innovate: ➡ Embrace emerging technologies to stay competitive!  ✅ Keep up to date with new succeeding technology like generative AI. ➡ Break down boundaries between engineers and business leaders.  ✅ Cross-functional teams promote new ideas and innovative solutions. ➡ Focus innovation on customer needs:  ✅ Acting on their desires and pain points will show great results, so gather feedback and adapt. ➡ Build an ecosystem for innovation. ✅ Partner with other orgs from startups to universities to encourage new solution development. In order to lead innovation most effectively, the right principles are important to keep in mind. Follow us at testRigor for more posts for tech leaders and news about AI. What are your thoughts on innovation in your market? 👇 testRigor, the #1 Generative AI-based Test Automation Tool that uses Generative AI to execute manual test cases. #cto #ctos #techleadership #leadershiptips #innovation

How to Resolve CTOs’ Top 10 Challenges in 2024 91% of CTOs saw technical debt as their biggest challenge heading into 2024. But STX Next’s 2023 survey showed many other shared concerns, like security, capacity, and employee retention. I wanted to share some tips for handling ten of these concerns. 1️⃣ Technical Debt ✅ The first step is a comprehensive audit of debt, letting us then split it up and prioritize it.  ✅ Take steps to minimize new debt like refactoring, code reviews, and using automation tools. 2️⃣ Talent Acquisition & Retention ✅ Promote your brand and culture online and at talent events like conferences.  ✅ Offer the types of benefits new hires want, and prioritize their well-being once hired. 3️⃣ Cybersecurity and Data Privacy ✅ Do regular security assessments and educate your team on security best practices. ✅ Invest in security technologies to catch incidents, and implement access control like MFA. 4️⃣ Budget Constraints ✅ Prioritize investments by potential ROI, and collaborate if you can with other departments.   ✅ Allow for budget adjustments, and consider outsourcing or cloud services for cost savings. 5️⃣ New Technology  ✅ Encourage upskilling your employees with education and training. ✅ Develop a team for risk management to assess new investments you’re considering.  For the full list in more detail, check out the attachment below. With the tech landscape’s constant changing, we can always take a step back and find new ways to improve.  Follow us at testRigor for more posts for tech leaders and news about AI. Any challenges you think deserve a mention that weren’t in the full list? 👇 testRigor, the #1 Generative AI-based Test Automation Tool that uses Generative AI to execute manual test cases. #cto #ctos #techleadership #leadershiptips #technicaldebt 

The 3 Fields Where Generative AI Could Add $1 Trillion in Productivity Customer service, software development, and knowledge work stand to show the greatest gains from gen AI. ➡ 71% of IDC-surveyed companies with AI investments have shown positive ROI in 14 months.  ➡ ROI averages $3.50 per $1 spent.  ➡ The biggest productivity improvements are in the three areas above. In a Stanford-MIT study of customer service agents:  ✅ Agents using gen AI averaged 14% more resolutions per hour. ✅ New and lower-skilled workers averaged 34% improvement! ✅ Business leaders expect very high ongoing value, most strongly for early adopters. A McKinsey study showed 84% of telecom companies using gen AI are seeing cost savings. In a study of software engineers from Zinnov and Ness Digital Engineering:  ✅ Using gen AI meant 70% less time to update code, 41% time to test, 32% less time to write new code.  ✅ Gen AI improved overall task completion time by average 38%. ✅ Senior engineers gave more context in and needed fewer prompts, benefiting most overall. As of November, 44% of companies are using gen AI in software dev and 34% are experimenting with it. Enterprise software company SAP has adopted dozens of gen AI tools used by 30k employees. Their greatest value was in analysis-heavy tasks: ➡ 40-50% productivity increase in customer, industry and market research.  Content creation and delivery also showed a 20-30% productivity increase. In a survey by the Harris Poll of knowledge workers and business leaders:  ✅ 80% of gen AI users said it improves the quality of their work. ✅ Users said it saves them on average 7.8 hours per week. ✅ This would mean $16,455 annual savings per worker. And if adopted nationwide, these savings would mean a >$1.6 trillion increase in US productivity. Follow us at testRigor for more AI news and posts to benefit tech leaders. Let us know your own experiences using gen AI! 👇 testRigor, the #1 Generative AI-based Test Automation Tool that uses Generative AI to execute manual test cases.  #generativeAI #ai #customerservice #softwaredevelopment #contentcreation

How Tech Leaders Can Promote Positive Tech Stewardship With technology’s effects on people’s lives, it’s important to take responsibility for what we use and create. It’s easy to think the company’s bottom line matters most… But shunning responsibility can cause vast societal harm. We can do better and use technology ethically, to benefit society and build trust with our customer base too. Many people outside the tech sector still have doubts about AI, even as our organizations embrace it. Distrust in a core technology means new products won’t easily thrive. So it benefits us all for tech leaders to build trust on an industry-wide basis: Being transparent about the risks, and using technology to benefit people, not exploit. Leading a business comes with a great deal of power, and we all know the quote about power and responsibility. But ethical use and production of tech isn’t the only way to use our power… We also have great influence through the policies we support. For this reason, diversity and inclusion are important parts of good stewardship: Not just for compliance, but to help provide opportunity and give ourselves a pool of diverse ideas. And it’s important to realize biases shape our products; research shows AI creators’ demographics affect its predictions. On the note of AI, a concern in the public discourse is that it may put people out of work. The technology we work with will shape society, so we should consider how we can prepare society for its effects. Creating plans to include non-traditional talent in our organizations is one way we can do this: allowing non-university talent with demonstrated skills, for instance.  Above all, it’s important to know the positives and negatives of our technology, and plan our outlooks as business leaders accordingly. How do you strive to have a positive influence with your organization? 👇 testRigor, the #1 Generative AI-based Test Automation Tool that uses Generative AI to execute manual test cases. #techleadership #ai #ethicalleadership #ctos 

How Engineering VPs Build Strong Multidisciplinary Teams VPs of Engineering, especially at startups, sometimes need to bring a dramatic change. To increase your department’s velocity and efficiency, examining the team structure is key. Multidisciplinary teams bring more perspectives and so are more product-oriented. This helps with structuring your department to give each team a unique expertise. Of course the disruptive nature of restructuring is worth considering, but often the benefits and solved pain points are worth it.   And doing Engineering Ops work can let you know if there is a need to restructure: Gather key information like numbers of engineers in each discipline, and what teams are dependent on each other right now. Then, to restructure: 1. Define your goals for the new teams: each one should be built for a clear purpose. 2. Determine new employee roles to let you achieve these goals. 3. Decide on new processes and tools for efficient communication and workflow. Let’s go through a brief example. Say that you’re a VP of Engineering overseeing 4 teams: front-end, backend, endpoint management, and security. Currently, your teams have intersection over many different projects, like managing company infrastructure, DevOps, and work on hardware and/or software platforms. Maybe it would be simpler to have teams devoted to each project, bringing knowledge from members of various current teams. For a new infrastructure team, you’d want security engineers included, and depending on your org’s specific infrastructure, endpoint expertise and backend or front-end personnel. A new team for platform management would be similar, with front-end or backend devs depending on your setup along with security needs. By organizing teams this way, you can concentrate employee knowledge on specific work areas and do targeted hiring for new developments. It may be a shake-up at first, but once you’ve settled into new teams, the improved efficiency speaks for itself. What do you think can make multidisciplinary teams worth it? 👇 testRigor, the #1 Generative AI-based Test Automation Tool that uses Generative AI to execute manual test cases. #engineeringVPs #engineeringmanagement #teamorganization #techleadership